Sam Beard

Sam Beard is the founder and president of Economic Security 2000, a project of the nonprofit National Development Council, of which he is chairman. He is also the author of Restoring Hope in America: The Social Security Problem.

Recent Articles

E conomist-bashing has long been a popular pastime among intellectuals right and left. Economists themselves, however, are not supposed to bash back. So when I decided to break that rule, I fully expected retribution. Surprisingly, until now all of the really personal attacks on me have come from the right, from the likes of Alan Reynolds and Judy Shelton (it will be news to them that I bear a special animus toward the left). But something like Robert Kuttner's essay in the September-October issue of The American Prospect [" Peddling Krugman "] was bound to appear sooner or later. I won't try to defend my motives or the value of my academic work (or justify in detail why, over the course of 20 years as a professional economist, I have changed my mind about some things). Let me instead focus on the two important questions on which Kuttner and I disagree: what it takes to do good economics, and what it means to be a liberal. Some people have a very narrow definition of what constitutes...